Data. Who’s Your Daddy?
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So I was hammering away at some phone calls today when it occurred to me how much data I have coming and going each and every minute of every day. Just to give you a snapshot of one segment of my day is kind of interesting if you look at it on a granular level and see what’s going on just when I make a phone call and create a new contact.
1) I dial the phone (data goes out from my phone).
2) Someone (a new contact) answers (voice data sent/received on both ends in the form of voice packets).
3) At the end of conversation I usually send an email (data sent and data hopefully received) and hopefully make an appointment (calendar data uploaded to my desktop and sent to recipient a response is then sent back).
4) I make a note in Salesforce (data sent and stored on Salesforce server).
5) I pull any information from my lead source BusinessWise and store notes there (data uploaded to BusinessWise, downloaded to my desktop, uploaded to Salesforce).
6) Next phone call is made.
So there is a lot of exchanges of data going on for every phone call and conversation I have. The reason I mention all of this is not to just tally those exchanges but it should give you an awareness that effective business requires careful tracking and maintenance of this data on a moment by moment basis.
In sales, the data I track includes but is not limited to contact names, phone numbers, emails, fax numbers, company information (including industry, physical address, titles and roles etc.), contracts, quotes, close ratios, lost sales, won sales, lost customers, and daily activity. Your business probably tracks a lot of these same things if not more data depending on your industry.
The moral of this story is a realization and then a thought in response. We send data back and forth by the bucket load and if you’re at all like me it is so easy to get overwhelmed by the volume as well as the tedium (especially if you’re not a detailed oriented person and you have to force yourself to be). The other temptation is to view data as some kind of stronger force that will overtake and drown you and it’s rare to find those people who just love to sit and collect and analyze data. However, shifting your paradigm to view this stream of data that is constantly flowing as something you can harness, take charge of and leverage I think is critical to success. If you can see it as a tool with which you can be an effective manager on any scale, you can move from being a timid professional drowning in names and numbers to someone who is organized, skillful, and smart.
So whether you deal with data on a large scale such as hosting or as a salesperson making phone calls each day, how do you view data? Is it something you can make an impact with or are you drowning in it?
Category: Colocation, Data Management, Sales, Virtualization
